Red Hat Reveals Upcoming Tech Focus and Strategies

By Matthew Schwartz, Enterprise Systems

11/02/2005

Red Hat said on Tuesday it plans to focus on reducing IT infrastructure costs for customers in 2006 and 2007. Enterprise savings will come from developer enablement, virtualization and stateless Linux because they increase organizational efficiency and agility, according to the company.

Red Hat says it will work with partners, the community and customers to help increase the quality and time-to-market of software development projects.

Red Hat's plans for developers include continued investment in open-source tools such as Eclipse, SystemTAP, Frysk and others, as well as an expansion of developer-focused content, services and training targeted at commercial application developers. Red Hat says it will also leverage its testing and certification experience to help customers decrease their internal platform validation efforts as the desire to validate more open-source components increases.

The next major release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, slated to debut in late 2006, will feature integrated server virtualization capability. Red Hat’s pricing of its virtualization technology will be designed to give customers the freedom to run an unlimited number of virtualized instances for a flat subscription fee. Customers will be able to enjoy the benefits of a dynamic virtualized environment without the need to track complex pricing models, the company says.

With stateless Linux, the personality and data that make an individual machine unique is moved to the network. Using intelligent backup and update agents, the user's personality and data are cached to any local machine the user chooses. This allows the mobility and flexibility of a standard desktop but with the administration costs of a thin client. For administration, maintenance and deployment costs are minimized. For users, the availability of the data is independent of the health or reliability of a single machine. A user's downtime is limited to the time it takes to receive a replacement machine.